› added 5 years ago

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TIL politician Stacey Abrams writes romance novels under the pen name Selena Montogomery, and has sold 100,000 copies.

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9D4D TIL in Feb, 2000, 60 Minutes did an exposé on “Echelon,” a top secret data collection program that vacuums up vast amounts of communications worldwide. Democracies usually have laws against spying on citizens, but Frost says Echelon members could ask other members to spy on their citizens for them
1aNZd TIL the way Americans speak pre-dates the way English speak. This is because "rhotic speech" spoken in America originally came from England, later the wealthy in order to be different adopted a soft "r", “win-tuh” instead of “win-terr”. It was "posh" to sound like that so everyone else copied them.
JeQV TIL in 1950, a disease called Myxomatosis was introduced to rabbits for population control in Australia. It wiped out 500,000,000 rabbits, giving them skin tumors and causing blindness, often killing them within 2 weeks.
W7X44 TIL American news magazine TIME named Adolph Hitler Man of the Year in 1938
v17l8 TIL that J. Michael Straczynski, writer of Spider-Man comics and creator of Bablyon 5, had a mentally ill prostitute for a mom and an abusive Nazi for a dad